Human zoo
Human zoos, also known as ethnological expositions, were a colonial practice of publicly displaying people, usually in a so-called "natural" or "primitive" state. They were most prominent during the 19th and 20th centuries. These displays often emphasized the supposed inferiority of the exhibits' culture, and implied the superiority of "Western society", through tropes that depicted marginalized groups as "savage". They then developed into independent displays emphasizing the exhibits' inferiority to western culture and providing further justification for their subjugation. Such displays featured in multiple colonial exhibitions and at temporary exhibitions in animal zoos.
Etymology
The term "human zoo" was not generally used by contemporaries of the shows, and was popularised by the French researcher Pascal Blanchard. The term has been criticised for denying the agency of the shows' non-European performers.According to Sandra Koutsoukos, the term "human zoos" was likely coined by French historians and anthropologists and first appeared in a 2002 publication. It is widely used in academia to critique the inhumanity and racism of events that displayed people from cultures deemed "exotic" or "savage".
Circuses and freak shows
The abstract concept of human displays in zoos has been documented throughout the duration of colonial history. In the Western Hemisphere, one of the earliest-known zoos, that of Moctezuma in Mexico, consisted not only of a vast collection of animals, but also exhibited humans, for example, dwarves, albinos and hunchbacks.During the Renaissance, the Medici developed a large menagerie in Rome. In the 16th century, Cardinal Hippolytus Medici had a collection of people of different races as well as exotic animals. He is reported as having a troupe of so-called Savages, speaking over twenty languages; there were also Moors, Tartars, Indians, Turks and Africans. In 1691, Englishman William Dampier exhibited a tattooed native of Miangas whom he bought when he was in Mindanao. He also intended to exhibit the man's mother to earn more profit, but the mother died at sea. The man was named Jeoly, falsely branded as "Prince Giolo" to attract more audience, and was exhibited for three months straight until he died of smallpox in London.
One of the first modern public human exhibitions was P. T. Barnum's exhibition of Joice Heth on 25 February 1835 and, subsequently, the Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker. These exhibitions were common in freak shows. Another famous example was that of Saartjie Baartman of the Namaqua, often referred to as the Hottentot Venus, who was displayed in London and France until her death in 1815.
During the 1850s, Maximo and Bartola, two microcephalic children from El Salvador, were exhibited in the US and Europe under the names Aztec Children and Aztec Lilliputians. However, human zoos would become common only in the 1870s in the midst of the New Imperialism period.
From 1936 to 1943, the Canadian province of Ontario displayed five White French Canadian quintuplets, whom the provincial government had removed from their birth family, in a human zoo called Quintland.
Start of human exhibits
In the 1870s, exhibitions of so-called "exotic populations" became popular throughout the western world. Human zoos could be seen in many of Europe's largest cities, such as Paris, Hamburg, London, and Milan, as well as American cities such as New York City and Chicago. Carl Hagenbeck, an animal trader, was one of the early proponents of this trend, when, in 1874, at the suggestion of Heinrich Leutemann, he decided to exhibit Sami people with the 'Laplander Exhibition'. What differentiated Hagenbeck's exhibit from others, was that he showed these people, with animals and plants, to "re-create", their "natural environment." He sold people the feeling of having travelled to these areas by witnessing his exhibits. These exhibits were a massive success, and only became larger and more elaborate. From this point forward, human exhibitions would lean towards stereotyping, and projecting western superiority. Greater feeding into the Imperialist narrative, that these people's culture merited subjugation. It also promoted scientific racism, where they were classified as more or less 'civilized' on a scale, from great apes to western Europeans.Hagenbeck would go on to launch a Nubian Exhibit in 1876, and an Inuit exhibit in 1880. These were also massively successful.
Aside from Hagenbeck, the Jardin d'Acclimatation was also a hotspot of ethnological exhibits. Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, director of the Jardin d'Acclimatation, decided, in 1877, to organize two ethnological exhibits that also presented Nubians and Inuit. That year, the audience of the Jardin d'acclimatation' doubled to one million. Between 1877 and 1912, approximately thirty ethnological exhibitions were presented at the Jardin zoologique d'acclimatation.
These displays were so successful they were incorporated into both the 1878 and the 1889 Parisian World's Fair, which presented a 'Negro Village'. Visited by 28 million people, the 1889 World's Fair displayed 400 indigenous people as the major attraction.
In Amsterdam, the International Colonial and Export Exhibition had a display of people native to Suriname, in 1883.
In 1886, the Spanish displayed natives of the Philippines in an exhibition, as people whom they "civilized". This event added flame to the 1896 Philippine revolution. Queen Consort of Spain, Maria Cristina of Austria, afterwards institutionalized the business of human zoos. By 1887, indigenous Igorot people & animals were sent to Madrid and were exhibited in a human zoo at the newly constructed Palacio de Cristal del Retiro.
At both the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the 1901 Pan-American Exposition Little Egypt, a bellydancer, was photographed as a catalogued "type" by Charles Dudley Arnold and Harlow Higginbotha.
At the 1895 African Exhibition in The Crystal Palace, around eighty people from Somalia were displayed in an "exotic" setting.
The Brussels International Exposition in Tervuren featured a "Congolese Village" that displayed African people in ersatz interpretations of native settings.
German ethnographs
Ethnology studies in Germany took a new approach in the 1870s as human displays were incorporated into zoos. These exhibits were lauded as 'educational' to the general population by the scientific community. Very quickly, the exhibits were used as a way to show that Europeans had "evolved" into a 'superior', 'cosmopolitan' life.In the late 19th century, German ethnographic museums were seen as an empirical study of human culture. They contained artifacts from cultures around the world organized by continent allowing visitors to see the similarities and differences between the groups and "form their own ideas".
Objectification in human zoos
Within the history of human zoos, there are patterns of overt sexual representation of displayed peoples, most frequently women. Such objectification often led to treatment that reflected a lack of privacy and respect, including the dissection and display of bodies after death without consent.An example of the sexualization of ethnically diverse women in Europe is Saartje Baartman, often referred to as her anglicized name Sarah Bartmann. Bartmann was displayed both when she was alive throughout England and Ireland and after her death in the Musée de l'Homme. While alive, she participated in a traveling show depicting her as a "savage female" with a large focus on her body. The clothes she was put in were tight and close to her skin color, and spectators were encouraged to "see for themselves" if Bartmann's body, particularly her buttocks, were real through "poking and pushing". Her living display was financially compensated but there is no record of her consenting to be examined and displayed after death.
Dominika Czarnecka theorizes on the relationship between the radicalization and sexualization of black female bodies in her journal article "Black Female Bodies and the 'White' View." Czarnecka focuses on ethnographic shows that were prominent in Polish territory in the late 19th century. She argues that an essential part of why these shows were so popular is the display of the black female body. Although the women in the shows were meant to be depicting Amazon warriors, their wardrobe was not similar to amazonian dress, and there are several documentations of comments from spectators about their revealing clothes and their bodies.
Although women were most frequently objectified, there are a few instances of "exotic" men being displayed due to their favorable appearance. Angelo Soliman was brought to Italy as a slave from Central Africa in the 18th century, but ended up gaining a reputation in Viennese society for his fighting skills and vast knowledge about language and history. Upon his death in 1796, this positive association did not prevent his body being "stuffed and exhibited in the Viennese Natural History Museum" for almost a decade.
Around the turn of the century
In 1896, to increase the number of visitors, the Cincinnati Zoo invited one hundred Sioux Native Americans to establish a village at the site. The Sioux lived at the zoo for three months.The 1900 World's Fair presented the famous diorama living in Madagascar, while the Colonial exhibitions in Marseilles and in Paris also displayed humans in cages, often nude or semi-nude. The 1931 exhibition in Paris was so successful that 34 million people attended it in six months, while a smaller counter-exhibition entitled The Truth on the Colonies, organized by the Communist Party, attracted very few visitors—in the first room, it recalled Albert Londres and André Gide's critiques of forced labour in the colonies. Nomadic Senegalese Villages were also presented.
In 1906, Madison Grant—socialite, eugenicist, amateur anthropologist, and head of the New York Zoological Society—had Congolese pygmy Ota Benga put on display at the Bronx Zoo in New York City alongside apes and other animals. At the behest of Grant, the zoo director William Hornaday placed Benga displayed in a cage with the chimpanzees, then with an orangutan named Dohong, and a parrot, and labeled him The Missing Link, suggesting that in evolutionary terms Africans like Benga were closer to apes than were Europeans. It triggered protests from the city's clergymen, but the public reportedly flocked to see it.File:Ota Benga at Bronx Zoo.jpg|thumb|Ota Benga, a human exhibit, in 1906. Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon during September. – according to a sign outside the primate house at the Bronx Zoo, September 1906.
On Monday, 8 September 1906, after just two days, Hornaday decided to close the exhibition, and Benga could be found walking the zoo grounds, often followed by a crowd "howling, jeering and yelling."